We have periodically carried stories on non-traditional uses of mobiles. Here is one about buying accident insurance that are bought and paid for through the mobiles. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO The accident insurance cover package premiums are priced between five and 20 rupees which can be paid at any Dialog reload centre in Sri Lanka that entitles the connection holder up to 50,000 rupees worth of claims. The accident cover targets the population who does not have comprehensive knowledge of insurance and low-income families. Customers can apply for the ‘eZ insurance’ cover at the time of a reload and the cover expires when the credit of the reload finishes.
The usually well-informed LBO.LK appears to have gotten confused in the “fog of war” created by interested parties seeking to extract rents from the sale of 25% of SLTL shares by NTT to GTH, both private companies, and by the unfortunate opacity of the transaction (something that is quite surprising because SLTL is a publicly traded company and the interests of thousands of shareholders are affected by the transaction). The source quoted by LBO below appears to have been quite familiar with the ORIGINAL shareholders agreement signed between the Government of Sri Lanka and NTT in 1997, but appears to have been comatose since then. Provisions regarding no universal service obligations (USO) and international exclusivities were in that agreement and did bind the Government of Sri Lanka. The no-USO provision continues to date, though the international exclusivity ended with the issuance of external gateway licenses in March 2003.
The title of the article “Sri Lanka to de-regulate payphone business,” is a little deceptive, but then that is probably not the fault of the Director General, but of the editor of LBO. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Sri Lanka plans to allow third parties to operate payphone booths in an attempt to popularise them in far flung areas outside the city of Colombo, a top official said.The island’s eight public switched telephone network (PSTN) operators will now be allowed to appoint a third party to operate and maintain a public phone booth on a revenue sharing model. “Its a scheme similar to selling lottery tickets, where the lottery operator does not undertake the burden of running, maintaining and collecting the money,” the head of Sri Lanka’s telecom watchdog, Kanchana Ratwatte said.
It is good to have a confident Minister. Of course, we would sleep better if we were shown the results of some on-the-ground simulations, rather than given bland assurances. After all some of us remember his statements about the large number of warning towers that would be erected and operational by the second anniversary of the tsunami (and the actual outcome was . . .
The HazInfo paper on CAP titled — Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka: Challenges of Internetworking with Common Alerting Protocol, has been published in the ISCRAM proceedings. The conference took place from 13-16 May 2007in Delft, The Netherlands. The final program of the 4th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management available on their website. It contains the complete program, including the abstracts of all papers and presentations. Conference was held at the Techniche Universiteit Delft.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO The theme of the 2007 World Telecom and Information Society Day (May 17th) is connecting the young. It is difficult to connect the young without also connecting the old. The young usually connect within the context of economic and other decisions made by family units. This column examines what is required to connect families at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) in Sri Lanka, drawing from the findings of a five-country Teleuse@BOP study. Powered by ScribeFire.
Today, at a ceremony to sign a large number of investment agreements at the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka, it was revealed that Bharti Airtel, Sri Lanka’s fifth mobile operator, is planning to invest USD 150 million. This amount is below industry expectations and suggests that Bharti will start slow, with a conventional rollout concentrated in the Northwestern, Western and Southern provinces. Pity.
Informa: TM doubles international budget Telekom Malaysia (TM) has earmarked to spend MYR8 billion (US$2.3 billion) this year expanding its international mobile businesses in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which is considerably more than the MYR2.8 billion it spent on its overseas units last year. TM chief executive Datuk Abdul Wahid Omar said TM’s foreign operations are expected to make 30% of group revenue this year, compared with 25% in 2006. However, the group is planning to trim its 87% stake in Sri Lankan mobile operator Dialog Telekom to not less than 80%, Wahid is quoted as saying.
The e-readiness rankings are relatively well regarded and do not contain absurdities such as Zimbabwe being ahead of India. The latest rankings are out and show India and the Philippines tied for 54th place (a one-place drop for India); Sri Lanka at 61 (dropping two places); and Pakistan at 63 (up four places and likely to catch up with Sri Lanka soon). Indonesia, another country of focus for LIRNEasia, has slipped 5 places to 67. Zimbabwe, the country that leads all of South Asia according to the ITU, is not in the top- 70 that is provided. Nigeria, on the other hand, is just behind Sri Lanka, at 62.
WorldSpace, LIRNEasia’s partner in the last-mile hazard information project, is promoting a satellite-radio-based mechanism for point-to-multipoint distribution of educational content such as readings and slides. The link below provides a complete description. The excerpt below includes description of an ongoing project in Sri Lanka (not involving LIRNEasia) and the general conclusions drawn by the author, Dr S Rangarajan, a good friend of LIRNEasia and Sri Lanka: Online Journal of Space Communication: An example of a CLASS network that is set up nationwide is the Sri Lankan Network for e-Health and Alerts (SNeHA). Medical professionals in the remote district centers use this network for continuing medical education, to update their knowledge and pass better health care to their patients.
The Central Bank Annual Report 2006 (p. 39) states: The inflow of foreign direct investment increased substantially by 110.3 per cent to US dollars 604 million in 2006 . . .
International consulting firm, Oxford Analytica (www.oxan.com) based in Oxford University and draws on a network of over 1,000 senior faculty members at Oxford and other major universities and research institutions around the world reported on Lirneasia’s “Telecoms on a Shoestrings” survey outcomes in its Asia-Pacific Daily Briefs on April 18th. OA’s existing clients include over 35 governments, major international institutions, and over 160 of the world’s leading multinational corporations and financial institutions. See http://www.
Please continue discussion from Software Issues in Sri Lanka Part 6, on this thread. This thread is devoted to diverse software issues discussed in the context of Sri Lanka. Please stick to the topic and keep the discussion civil. Previous discussion is archived in the following threads: Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 5 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 4 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 3 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 2 Questioning ICT Myths
This colloquium will be on a new paper that is being developed on tools for intelligent benchmark regulation, based on Harsha de Silva and Tahani Iqbal’s presentation on Price & Affordability Indicators at the WDR Expert Forum in Singapore. The tools under consideration are price baskets and price elasticity of demand.
Sri Lanka: Cutting it Mobile phone use is taking off in Sri Lanka – though not, perhaps, in ways that service operators might have hoped. FROM THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT In the world’s poorer countries, the purchase of a mobile phone has become increasingly affordable. Using it, however, can still be a struggle. Low-income mobile phone owners in Sri Lanka are getting around this problem with a novel method for keeping costs down. Known as ring cutting, mobile phone subscribers rely on ring tones to communicate with others, rather than actually staying on the line to talk.
By Rohan Samarajiva The findings of a pilot project on learning how information-communication technologies and community-based training can help in responding to disasters such as tsunamis were discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “SHARING KNOWLEDGE ON DISASTER WARNING, WITH A FOCUS ON COMMUNITY-BASED LAST–MILE WARNING SYSTEMS” held on March 28th and 29th, 2007 at the Sarvodaya headquarters in Moratuwa. These finding ranged from the difficulties experienced in communicating disaster warnings to villages when mobile GSM and fixed CDMA telecom networks were not functional due to conflict conditions to the importance of not leaving newspapers on top of sensitive electronic equipment which can overheat and shut down as a result. In terms of the five communication technologies that were evaluated across multiple criteria, the addressable satellite radio sets and the java-enabled mobile phones performed the best, with the GSM-based community warning device developed locally by Dialog Telekom, MicroImage and University of Moratuwa following closely. The VSAT based warning system did not perform too well in the tests. The objective was not to declare a winner among the technologies, but to find out how they could be improved to perform reliably in the difficult conditions of Sri […]